Eddies can be important for structuring biological communities, from plankton to large vertebrates. Is there evidence that under climate change, the production/persistance/energy (other?) of eddies may change?
Problem is that not until now ocean models are catching up with what standard atmosphere model have been doing for decades: Resolving ocean eddies. The reason is the different scales for baroclinic stability (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroclinity) in the atmosphere and in the ocean.
Maybe we derive the similar conclusion for ocean eddies under climate change as for midlatitude cyclogenesis.
For some particular areas there is already evidence of increase mesoscale eddies formation due to climate chages. This is particularlly the case for the Southern Ocean, where the increase of in eddy energy is related to the increase in the westerlly winds (eg. Meredith & Hogg 2006, Fyfe et al. 2007). The impact on the biolgy still to be determined.
You may also be interested in Lehahn et al. (2011), that studied chlorophill patches observed by satellite in the Agulhas rings.
I think everyone should read McWilliams and Flierl (1977)'s paper on sampling requirements for the ocean eddy field and then ask themselves if the data really exists to answer this question. Given that it takes 10-20 yrs of measurements to define a mean flow in most of the world's ocean, how does one estimate a trend from a relatively sparse data set?? ... and then there is the question, Are the statistics really stationary for such a calculation??? cheers, arthur
This subject had occupied me in the late 1990s, when I did a related presentation at the 23rd EGS General Assembly at Nice, France (1998). Despite the fact that the impact on the ocean is very slow, in the Mediterranean we had a major impact with the massive dense water production in the Aegean, known as the Eastern Mediterranean Transient event, which caused a major change in the stratification in the Cretan Sea. According to my analysis, this changed the barolcinic Rossby radius in the region, and subsequently was responsible for the domination of a stable large eddy dipole that replaced a varying eddy circulation north of Crete. We have not proceeded to model the phenomenon, we would be very much interested, if anyone wants to do it...I am sending an attachment of the presentation I did at that meeting
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